FROM THE PASTOR'S DESK:
Thanks for a great parish picnic at St. Bartholomew's! A lot of people worked hard to make it a wonderful time for food and fellowship!
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With continual AI advances, especially in the military, we are now faced with contemplating what previously would have been unthinkable: killer robots. On Aug. I0, 2026, the National Catholic Register published the following article by Jonah McKeown. Here is the article:
The 'Killer Robots' Have Arrived. Here's How the Church Is Responding
As the Catholic Church stands firm against autonomous weapons, does AI have any place in watfare?
A whirring armed drone hovers above the battlefield, its sensors searching with cold precision for its next target.With the push of a button, a soldier on the ground activates "Terminator mode," setting the remorseless machine looset o seek and destroy anything and any human being in the area it considers an enemy.
This horrifying scenario isn't science fiction. It allegedly happened two years ago, during a weapons test in Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of several Russian soldiers.
The incident, which a Ukrainian drone company's CEO disclosed in June, is believed to have been the first completely autonomous kill in combat. And with the world's superpowers investing tens of billions of dollars in autonomous weapons technology, these so-called killer robots may be edging ever closer to widespread use.
Amid this push, the Catholic Church has emerged as one of the most consistent voices against the proliferation of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), emphasizing that decisions over life and death in warfare cannot be entrusted to machines alone.
However, on the question of whether AI has any place at all in modern warfare, the answer from a Catholic perspective is less clear-cut.
And as U.S. military leaders argue that the apparent inevitability of the deployment of LAWS by adversaries compels the American military to follow suit, the question remains whether soldiers will be free to follow their consciences and opt out of immoral uses of these weapons.
Church Teaching on 'Killer Robots'
While the Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that "evil and injustices accompany all war," the Church also teaches that individuals and nations have a right to self-defense against an unjust aggressor and can use lethal force if necessary.
The application of Church teaching to LAWS, specifically, hinges on the fact that in order for a decision of life and death in warfare to be just, it must be made by a human person as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense. Such decisions, therefore, cannot be entrusted to machines alone.
In his May 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV stated bluntly that it is "not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems" and expressed concerns about AI making war appear more "feasible."
"AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict; indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized," the Pope wrote.
Charles Camosy, a moral theologian and professor at The Catholic University of America, has spoken often in favor of the Church's view of LAWS and calls the present moment a "massive opportunity" to widely share a Catholic view of human dignity in war. He joined other moral theologians and ethicists this past March in publicly supporting AI company Anthropic's decision to reject the Pentagon's demands on its technology related to mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
In a recent testimony on autonomous weapons for Congress' Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC), Camosy noted that any use of AI in warfare must preserve human judgment not only in the sense of taking responsibility for decisions or errors made by AI weapons, but crucially preserving the ability of soldiers to recognize their adversaries as fellow humans who are made in God's image.
"Every single human being on every side of every conflict is owed the dignity of being seen and recognized as a person, not processed as data," Camosy said in his testimony.
Joseph Capizzi, director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on just-war theory, expressed a similar view, stressing that no system can ever fully replace human judgment.
"No matter the level of sophistication, a program cannot comprehend the humanity of a potential victim the way another human can," he explained to the Register. "That potential victim can only be a mere datum in a calculation......................................... The decisions AI makes are not judgments; they don't involve the fully-human ways of informing and engaging conscience for action."
Are AI Weapons Inevitable?
The Church's stance against LAWS is not out of step with public sentiment: International bodies like the United Nations have explicitly called for a ban on these so-called killer robots, and at least three-quarters of Americans agree that decisions involving lethal force in war should "not be left entirely to artificial intelligence systems," according to recent opinion polls.
But despite public sentiment and the Church's constant opposition, the current in the U.S. military sector is flowing in the opposite direction. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a late-April talk that autonomous weapons are going to be a "key and essential part of everything" the U.S. military does in the future. Subsequently, in June, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a provision for fiscal year 2027 to streamline the acquisition and delivery of unmanned weapons systems across the entire military.
Despite this, U.S. military policy currently does not allow for the use of fully autonomous weapons as such. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, originally issued in 2012 and updated in January 2023, mandates that human commanders maintain "appropriate levels of human judgment" over the use of force by autonomous and semiautonomous weapon systems. A bipartisan bill currently under consideration in Congress would codify this directive into law.
But one recent journal article from a researcher with the U.S. Army argues that lest the U.S. lose any advantage over its geopolitical rivals, policies ought to change to allow autonomous weapons to operate at "machine speed" after a commander initially authorizes an attack, thereby allowing it to act and kill on its own.
This possible policy change is viewed by some in the military community as an inevitability. Killer robots are coming,"regardless of what one believes about the ethics," writes retired major general and policy analyst John Ferrari andresearcher Dillon Prochnicki in another recent paper from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
However, Camosy argued that not even the threat of Chinese-controlled LAWS could justify the U.S. deploying such weapons, at least not from a Catholic perspective. As he put it, Catholics are not consequentialists, meaning there are certain acts in human life that should never be done for any reason, regardless of consequences.
Regarding the possibility of developing LAWS as a means of deterring other countries from using them, the Church has historically cautioned against applying such logic. In the midst of the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, for instance, St. John Paul II taught that nuclear deterrence could only be conditionally justified as a step toward total disarmament.
Other Military Uses of AI?
While Pope Leo has significant concerns about the use of AI in warfare, the question of whether the tech has any place on the battlefield has remained open to interpretation among Catholics.
Capizzi told the Register that he believes Pope Leo's call in his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to subject AI to"the most rigorous ethical constraints" does not preclude the use of AI for some military purposes.
"Not every use of AI in warfare is immoral. Modern warfare, modern activity of all sorts, involves enormously sophisticated computation," he said.
Craig Albert, a professor specializing in national security studies at Augusta University in Georgia, recently penned an article arguing that while it is not permissible to entrust lethal and irreversible decisions to autonomous systems, Albert believes the Pope's imperative to impose "rigorous ethical constraints" on AI-enhanced weapons should not amount to a complete abstaining from AI-enabled military capabilities.
Albert subsequently told the Register in an interview that he believes AI has the potential to help soldiers and commanders by enhancing precision. This would include the ability to recall or redirect missiles, potentially leading to fewer civilian casualties and other errors, enhancing in Albert's opinion, the proportionality and discrimination needed for appropriate uses of force under just war.
For his part, Camosy, again drawing clear lines around the unacceptable idea that an AI could ever replace human beings in the lethal decision-making process, also did not dismiss the idea of AI playing some role in military contexts.
"We need to think more about Al's role in war more generally, but there are good arguments to be had about AI used for, say, intelligence purposes," Camosy told the Register in written comments, calling such uses an "open question" forCatholics.
Can Catholics Opt Out?
If autonomous weapons do ever become widely used in the U.S. military, it remains unclear whether a soldier of any faith could conscientiously object to using them. Camosy, in his recent testimony, highlighted this fact and called on Congress to pass specific protections under law protecting soldiers who refuse to deploy or supervise a system that makes lethal targeting decisions without human oversight.
Msgr. Stuart Swetland, a Navy veteran and president of Donnelly College in Kansas City, affirmed that there ought to be a mechanism whereby soldiers can opt out of a specific activity or conflict if they believe it to be unjust. If a soldier is ever ordered to fire a fully autonomous weapon under the current legal framework, he should know that soldiers are not compelled to obey, and in fact must not obey, orders known to be illegal, he added.
Even without specific protections, however, Msgr. Swetland said Catholics ought to remain firm in refusing to cross the line and deploy fully autonomous weapons, even if complex scenarios can be concocted to make them appear to be justified.
Above all, Catholic soldiers should not accept moral relativism in warfare, Msgr. Swetland said. To do so, the priest said, would mean "literally all hell will break loose."
Saint Thomas of Villanova, Archbishop, who in his lifetime was already called "the almsgiver" and "the father of the poor," pray for us. Father Miller